Paul Julian Whitehouse is a Welsh actor, writer and comedian. He was one of the main stars of the BBC sketch comedy series The Fast Show, and has also starred with Harry Enfield in the shows Harry & Paul and Harry Enfield & Chums. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was in the top 50 comedy acts voted for by comedians and comedy insiders.
Early life
Whitehouse was born on 17 May 1958, in Stanleytown, Glamorgan. His father, Harry, worked for the National Coal Board and his mother, Anita, was a singer with the Welsh National Opera. The family moved to Enfield, Middlesex, when he was four years old, which led to his discovering his talent for mimicry:
Career
Whitehouse attended the University of East Anglia from autumn 1976, where he made friends with Charlie Higson. The pair spent little of their first year studying, instead playing sitar and performing with their jazz fusion combo, the Right Hand Lovers, along with other university friends Duncan Beamont, Kevin Buckland and Dave Cummings. Whitehouse dropped out and squatted in a council flat in Hackney, east London and occasionally worked as a plasterer. After Higson graduated in 1980, he moved in with Whitehouse, working by day as a decorator and performing at night and the weekends with his new punk-funk group The Higsons. The pair began working as tradesmen on a house shared by comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which inspired them to start writing comedy. They moved to an estate where in a pub they met Harry Enfield, a neighbour with a stage act, and after he gained a place on Channel 4's Saturday Live, the pair were invited to write for him. Whitehouse created Enfield's character Stavros, and then Loadsamoney ; he also appeared as Enfield's sidekick Lance on Saturday Live. This success turned Whitehouse and Higson's career, and they began to appear on Vic Reeves' Big Night Out and extensively for the BBC, with Whitehouse appearing on A Bit of Fry and Laurie as a man with a clinical need to have his bottom fondled, and , then on Harry Enfield's Television Programme, where he developed numerous characters including DJ Mike Smash of Smashie and Nicey, alongside Enfield as Dave Nice.
TV career
While watching a preview tape of highlights from Enfield's programme, Whitehouse and Higson were inspired to create a rapid-fire delivery comedy series, which would evolve into The Fast Show. Whitehouse's characters included:
An online series of The Fast Show commissioned by Fosters led to six weekly episodes launched on 10 November 2011. In 2001 and 2002, Whitehouse wrote and performed in two series of the BBC comedy drama Happiness, in which he played a voice-over actor with a mid-life crisis. Whitehouse wrote, produced and appeared with Chris Langham in the 2005 comedy drama Help, also for the BBC. In this series he took 25 roles, all patients of Langham's psychotherapist. The pair's collaboration resulted in Whitehouse taking the witness stand on 24 July 2007 in the trial of Langham, in regard to the charge of holding explicit images and videos of minors. Langham claimed he downloaded this material as research for a character in the second series of Help, but Whitehouse's testimony only partially corroborated this explanation. Whitehouse appeared in the BBC sketch series Harry & Paul, starring alongside Harry Enfield. Whitehouse starred alongside Charlie Higson in the BBC2 comedy series Bellamy's People, with the first episode broadcast on 21 January 2010. The comedy evolved from the BBC Radio 4 program Down the Line. The show originally had the working title of Bellamy's Kingdom. In October 2014, Harry Enfield and Whitehouse returned to the characters of Frank and George in a sketch for Channel 4's testicular cancer awareness comedy series The Feeling Nuts Comedy Night. In 2015, his sitcom Nurse, based on his Radio 4 series of the same name, debuted on BBC2 on 10 March. In August 2015, Whitehouse, alongside Enfield, in celebration of their 25-year partnership, presented An Evening With Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. In June and July 2018 Whitehouse appeared with his long time friend and fellow comedian Bob Mortimer in a BBC2 six part comedy series, . The two friends, who both suffer from heart conditions, share their thoughts and experiences while fishing at a variety of locations around the UK.
Radio
Whitehouse and Charlie Higson produced and appeared in a spoof phone-in show Down the Line on BBC Radio 4. The first series was broadcast May–June 2006. A second series was broadcast 16 January–20 February 2007, during which they won a Sony Radio Academy Award. A third series was broadcast in January 2008, a fourth in January 2011 and a fifth in May 2013. In February 2014, Radio 4 broadcast Nurse, written by Whitehouse and David Cummings and starring Esther Coles in the title role, with Whitehouse playing a variety of characters, including Graham Downs who had previously appeared in Down the Line.
Other
He also starred alongside Eddie Large and Russ Abbot in episode 4 of Horne & Corden. Comic Relief 2011 contained a new parody video of Newport directed by MJ Delaney featuring Whitehouse and other Welsh celebrities lip-syncing to the song. It is available to download via iTunes. Johnny Depp described Whitehouse as "the greatest actor of all time". Whitehouse and John Sullivan's son, Jim Sullivan, have written Only Fools and Horses The Musical, which launched on 9 February 2019 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London. Whitehouse stars as Grandad.
Influences
Whitehouse's main early influences were the sketches of Les Dennis and Dustin Gee and The Goodies. Tommy Cooper made him laugh, as did Morecambe and Wise and the television show Dad's Army. He cites his modern influences as Harry Enfield, of whom he says without meeting he would not have been doing what he does now, and the approach of Reeves and Mortimer who he thinks are "far and away the best comedians that we have had in this country for a long while."
